“Shout out, do not hold back!” the Lord told the prophet. “Lift up your voice like a trumpet!”
I wonder what life was like in those days, in and around Jerusalem. I wonder if those were quiet days, when the voice of the prophet sounding like a trumpet through the remains of the city would have brought public attention to the words. Or if they were they days like ours, days of constant noise, when I for one barely know what to say anymore amid the assault of trumpets determined to drown out what remains of integrity and honesty and reverence.
Senator Mitt Romney from Utah voted “guilty” on one of the articles of impeachment against the President, and he did so knowing that his vote wouldn’t change the outcome, that there was nothing to gain politically and that there would be intense backlash. He said on the Senate floor, “The allegations made in the articles of impeachment are very serious. As a senator-juror, I swore an oath, before God, to exercise ‘impartial justice.’ I am a profoundly religious person. I take an oath before God as enormously consequential. I knew from the outset that being tasked with judging the president, the leader of my own party, would be the most difficult decision I have ever faced. I was not wrong.”[1] Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina responded on a call-in radio show, “All I can tell you is that God gave us free will and common sense. I used the common sense God gave me to understand this was a bunch of B.S.” And he explained that for Mr. Romney to arrive at a different conclusion, meant that “your religion is clouding your thinking here."[2] If this were an actual conversation, then Mr. Romney would perhaps have pointed out that, rather than clouding, his religion was illuminating his thinking with the values and convictions of his faith. But actual conversation and real debate and truthful speech are endangered species in our time.
“Shout out, do not hold back!” the Lord told the prophet—but what good can come from shouting when all are doing it? When all are shouting the level of noise goes up and everything else goes down. Does anybody hear what’s actually going on? Does anybody notice the cracks in the magnificent house this republic has long aspired to be?
“Shout out, do not hold back!” the Lord told the prophet during a time of deep uncertainty for Israel. A great number of leaders and skilled workers had been taken into exile after the Babylonian armies had sacked Jerusalem about seventy years earlier, but now some of the exiles were returning, or rather their children and grandchildren — people full of longing and hope for a new beginning for the city and the land and the nation. But the new beginning was delayed; the return from exile was nothing like the joyous parade they had envisioned. “Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” The people are complaining that God is not paying attention to them and their religious practice, and they seem to wonder, “Why should we continue to worship, if it doesn’t do us any good? What’s the point?”
“Day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, delight to draw near to me,” God declares, and that’s awesome, isn’t it? — I wish people in my city were as eager to seek and delighted to know God! But then God adds, “as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God.” There was a disconnect between the intention expressed in worship — to seek God, know God’s ways, be near to God — and the actual conduct of the community. There was a disconnect between the people’s idea of worship as a means to get God’s attention and the prophet’s idea of worship as a way to align ourselves and our daily life with the purposes of God. And the purposes of God, according to the prophet, are freedom and covenant, justice and mercy, righteousness and a neighborly economy. “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be their slaves no more; I have broken the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect.”[3] This God desires a covenant community committed to loosing the bonds of injustice and breaking the yoke of oppression so all may walk erect; a community where fasting means deciding against self-indulgence and for sharing life’s essentials with the hungry, the poor, and the naked. “The devotion [this God] requires is solidarity that troubles with the elemental requirements of economic life for every member of the community.”[4]
Where is this covenant community? In the prophetic imagination it extends from your neighbor to the farthest reaches of creation. And this kind of community has been resisted and denied ever since God first revealed it to humans: in the garden, in the wilderness, in Israel, in Jesus, in the church.
Where is this covenant community? Wherever we let ourselves be drawn into it by the God who made us and who breaks every yoke, every dividing wall, every hostility between us.
Margaret Thatcher, some of you will remember her, famously said in 1987,
“I think we have been through a period when too many people have been given to understand that when they have a problem it is government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant. I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They are casting their problems on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no governments can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours. People have got their entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There is no such thing as an entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”
One author called this “an expression of methodological individualism,”[5] I call it forgetfulness.
Rabbi Shai Held wrote about our passage from Isaiah — it’s read every year on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement —
So much of human religiosity comes down to a hoax we try to perpetrate on God. We’ll give You worship, we say in effect, and You just mind Your own business. Your place is the church, the synagogue, or the mosque; butt out of our workplaces and our voting stations. You’re the God of religion, not politics or economics.
And God laughs. If you want to worship me, God says, you’re going to have to learn to care about what I care about—and who. And as the Bible never tires of telling us, God cares about the widow, the orphan, and the stranger; the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden. If those people don’t matter to us, then God doesn’t really matter to us either. That’s Isaiah’s message.[6]
The poor, Isaiah reminds us, are not “people [who] have got their entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations,” but kin. They are we and we are they, or in Paul’s words, “we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.”[7] The social solidarity implicit in our faith and the vision of covenant community has always been a challenge, and the American project of building a more perfect union has been no exception. I believe that the deterioration in our public discourse has a lot to do with the ease with which we say I and me and mine, and the slowness with which we learn to live and say we, particularly a comprehensive we no longer dependent on the exclusion of them.
I’m trying to wrap my mind around where we are – a fragmented and fragmenting church in a fragmented and fragmenting world – and what this moment means for us as followers of Jesus and servants of God’s reign. Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.” Perhaps it begins with small things like remembering in the dark hours that “you” in those bold declarations is plural. There is no private faith, no private ministry, no private communion. Isaiah told his first audience to end their privatized, self-centered fasting, and to practice the fast of God’s choosing: to untie or cut the knots of injustice, to break the yokes that kept their neighbors from walking erect, and to share life’s essentials so that all would receive them.
“Then,” he said, “your light shall break forth like the dawn. … Your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places; … and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.”
Then all shall shout out, and none hold back. All shall lift up their voices — and the singing shall be glorious.
[1] https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2020/02/05/full-transcript-sen-mitt/
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/02/06/lindsey-graham-god-wont-ask-why-didnt-you-convict-trump/4683788002/
[3] Lev 26:13
[4] Brueggemann, WBC, 189.
[5] See Samuel Brittan https://www.ft.com/content/d1387b70-a5d5-11e2-9b77-00144feabdc0; original quote in Woman’s Own, October 31, 1987
[6] Rabbi Shai Held https://www.christiancentury.org/article/living-word/august-25-ordinary-21c-isaiah-589b-14
[7] Rom 12:5